The River Answers
by 7Kleio
Summary: A little twist on the swan dive issue.


Author's note: I don't know what it says that I'm sitting in Italian class, studying Francesco Chiesa, and Javert pops into my head with a new friend. Anyway, the poem that served as inspiration is below, just don't try to translate this via an internet site-- they'll butcher it. As for the direction of this, I don't know. It started out as angst, morphed into farcical satire, and then decided to be angst again. Blame Javert. He's off his meds.

You know the drill—Les Mis isn't mine.

_Il destino degli uomini—Francesco Chiesa_

_E dissi al fiume: "lasciami passare"!_

_Rispose il fiume: "e per andar dove?_

_Anche di lá uomini e donne… Il bove_

_mugghia ugualmente e pugnon le zanzare._

_Che speri? L'istesse acque, dolci, amare,_

_lungo l'altro mio margine! E un dí piove,_

_un dí fa bello. E la stessa aria muove_

_la favolosa selva, che ti pare._

_Sempre sull'altra sponda il ben che agogni,_

_uomo; il bene perduto o invano atteso._

_Io, freddo, in mezzo, tra il sognante e i sogni…_

_Sempre, sopra la test alto sospeso_

_il tuo fato, se vai, se stai. Per ogni_

_strada, da trascinar, sempre, il tuo peso"._

**The River Answers**

The only thought in his mind as he leaned heavily against the bridge's railing was that it should be raining. He stared sightlessly into the roaring waters, conjuring the scent of wet pavement, the sound of the drops splashing against the paving stones, the heavy feel of drenched cloth, but there was no rain. Only the river.

He squeezed burning eyes closed, jaw clenched, refusing to think. And then eyes opened, head tilted back, once again searching for those pinpoints of guiding light. He shook his head and lowered his gaze once more to the river. Such dark clouds. Surely it should be raining…

"Why…!" The question was forced past a tight throat and gritted teeth in a noise somewhere between a sob and a hiss of rage. Hands tightened on the rail until knuckles were white. He shook his head eyes squeezed shut once more. "Why…!"

He jumped.

The stinging shock of hitting the water, a freezing surface hard as marble and yet yielding at the same time, blackness even more complete than when he'd seen it from atop the bridge, the absence of air… He opened his eyes, seeing only the gray, swirling movement of the water and a shadow. A shadow that drew nearer and became an indistinct shape with icy hands that reached out and seized his own and---

The universe paused.

He blinked furiously, certain that this was some bizarre hallucination, but the sudden and gentle light remained, illuminating only the sight of himself suspended in a gray void that could have been the murky depths of the river if not for the clarity of his sight and the lack of invasive cold… and the figure in front of him. Sharp, finely drawn features, and flowing hair that couldn't seem to settle on a color, but somehow wasn't gray.

"Well, then?"

He blinked again, but she was still there, hands on her hips, oddly colorless hair swirling about her waist. The tail settled it. He was hallucinating. Mermaids did not exist, in the Seine or anywhere else!

"Well? Can't you speak?"

Her penetrating stare and impatient tilt of the head brought out the barely-controlled indignation and defensive irritation he'd always had difficulty hiding. "Mam'selle, I don't know who you are or what you think you're playing at, but I can assure you—"

"You're not especially convincing, you know. Right, then, question and answer. You questioned, I'm supposed to answer, but it's difficult to answer when the question makes no sense, so why don't we go best out of three? I'll question what your question meant, you can answer, and then you can repeat the question which I'll then answer, and we can all be getting along with things. All right then?"

Some part of his mind registered that he was gaping like a fish. "What on earth do you mean?"

She gave a rather annoying tilt of her head that put him in mind of nothing so much as a particularly presumptuous gamine, an association which called the standard response of anger to the front of his mind. "I mean that your question was unclear. So, please. Clarify."

"I don't understand."

"Obviously."

"Mam'selle, you will kindly explain yourself! You are being a deliberate nuisance!"

"Mmmh, yes," She lifted a pale shoulder in smugly amused shrug. "But you're missing the point."

"How unsurprising." he scowled. "But what you don't seem to realize is that this entire conversation is missing any sort of point."

"So find one." Irritation tinged her voice. "You don't strike me as terribly impaired. Repetitive, perhaps." When he simply remained gloweringly silent, she gave a theatrical sigh. "Oh, very well. The point, my dear sir, is usually balance. It's possibly your point as well. That's often what people lack. Am I right? Or is your question still nonsensical?"

"Balance." He echoed, annoyed. "This is about some abstract concept that--"

"No." She snapped. "It's... you..." She trailed off, shaking her head, and lifted her hands to massage her temples as though the bizarre encounter were giving her a headache. She stared at him for several moments through her fingers before sighing.

He said nothing, wishing for the first time in many years for something to fidget with.

"All right," she finally lowered her hands to her hips and he had the feeling that if she had feet she would have been shifting her weight from one foot to the other. "I'm sorry. Obviously my approach was wrong. Perhaps we should simply start over."

He folded his arms, raising an eyebrow in practiced skepticism. "Very well. As I recall, you neglected to introduce yourself."

She crossed her own arms in unconscious mimicry and shrugged again, her hair rippling in the invisible current. "Doesn't matter. Pleasure to meet you anyway."

The breezy irreverence was what made him snap. "Creatures such as yourself don't even exist! This situation is the most absurd..." Even headed into a full-force diatribe, the hostility in her eyes was enough to splinter iron, let alone his train of thought.

"You're not really in a position to criticize at the moment. Setting aside any philosophical or hypothetical issues of reality or the lack thereof," she sneered, "I do have an obligation to be getting on with. Perhaps we may continue our discussion."

It was not a question, he realized, and the sixth sense at the back of his head that he'd learned to trust on the streets, that warned him he was being watched, that an attack was imminent, or simply that a person he was dealing with was not as harmless as they appeared, that sense was clamoring for him to shut up and mind his step. There was power here-- he could feel it like thunder in the air before a heavy storm-- and an ambivalence he recognized from encounters with assassins and mercenaries. The being before him was about to toss whatever mysterious responsibility she had to the winds and damn the consequences.

"Very well, then," he cocked his head, "continue."

"Thank you." She gave a slow blink that seemed more in keeping with a feline, gazing off somewhere over his left shoulder. When she spoke, her voice was far away and rather abstracted. "Returning to the moment ago on the bridge, you asked a question. I am required to answer it, yet I cannot for the simple reason that I don't understand what you meant by it. The two of us are trapped here. I must understand the question and answer it. You must understand the answer. Then time will continue."

It took a moment for this to sink in. "You-- what?"

She simply raised an eyebrow and shifted her weight to her other hip.

Realization crept over him and the back of his neck grew warm. "You were at the bridge?" He asked quietly.

"Under it, yes." She said unconcernedly. "Why do you ask?"

He looked away, arms pulling even tighter to his chest, but could still feel her eyes on him, becoming more piercing by the moment. There was silence for several moments. The absence of anything but the heavy grayness began to make his eyes ache and he closed them rather than look back at what could only be further evidence of insanity. Insanity which had to be obvious, even to a figment of imagination spawned by said insanity. Once again, he was drowning in misery. The river had been merciful compared to that sensation...

Cold hands on his face brought him back and he opened his eyes only to once again be confronted with hers. Two shades of blue-gray met for long moments. Through his boots he could feel the occasional touch of her fins as her tail lazily fanned through the gray fog. The irritation and irreverence was still in her eyes, but the predominant impression had become one of concerned bemusement.

When she spoke, her voice was as quiet as when he's asked her about the bridge. "I know something was horribly wrong," she said. "I know you were in some kind of trouble and the world was pulled out from under you."

He tried to look down or to one side, but the pressure of her hands wouldn't allow it. "You've walked that bridge many times," she continued. "In fact, you've walked all of the bridges quite often and for years now you have been struggling against the current of whatever metaphorical river you have been in. And I know quite well how difficult that can be."

Her hands dropped to from his face and slid down his arms, forcing them to uncross so she could grasp his own hands. He still couldn't speak.

Her voice became progressively gentler, but her eyes still held his own. "I know there is a coldness in you, something that is frozen or held still. But I don't know why." She shook her head, dropping both her gaze and her grip on his hands to back away a bit. "You asked me 'why' and I think that's the answer, but I still don't quite understand the question."

His mouth opened and a hoarse voice that he hardly recognized as his own spoke. "I have served justice all my life, but mercy has shown me that there is no justice. And so my life has been nothing. There was nothing else to do."

She stared hard into his eyes with a concentration so fierce that his voice died away and he could do nothing but stare back, in full grip of the helpless despair that had first begun to wash over him at the barricades. When she finally spoke, her voice was once again abstracted to the point that he wondered if she was speaking to him at all.

"Service, justice, loyalty, and obedience. The question then becomes a debate on the merits of such and is cast toward the negative when another characteristic is added to the mix and appears to disrupt or even negate the effectiveness of the others." Her gaze became focused on his own once more. "At the risk of simplifying everything, I think your question becomes a debate over humanity's standards against the Ideal." She paused. "And the mutable nature of justice."

"No," He shook his head stubbornly, "Justice must remain fixed. Without justice there is only anarchy and we are no better than animals, lacking any ability to reach beyond the moment, to think rationally."

"And a marvelous job you're doing, too." Her smile was wry, but the gentle tone took the sting from her words. Once more she took his hands in hers. "But what I said earlier is true. There must be balance. Where is life without the irrational moments and insanities? Where are beauty and order without pain and anarchy to compare them to?"

He bit his lip and looked away, but she touched a fingertip to his chin and applied a faint pressure until he was forced to look back. "The brightest light also casts the darkest shadow." She continued. "Light must have darkness beside it, or it ceases to be light. There can be no justice without mercy, no stars without the darker mystery in between them."

"But the stars are fixed just as justice is." He argued. "Their light is constant and self-contained. They stand against the darkness, not with it. They don't change."

"No," she cocked her head thoughtfully, "They only change a great deal more slowly than everything else. There's nothing wrong with change, it just has to be at the right time and in the right way."

There was something tight and burning in his chest and behind his eyes. "But how can you know when the right time is or which way…"

She touched a hand to his face once more, brushing her fingers over his eyes so they closed. He could feel her hair feathering against him as she leaned close and whispered: "You make a choice. Choose the time and the way. Between dreamer and dream is no place at all. One or the other, dear Javert. That is your answer."

He frowned, thinking to ask how she knew his name, but then there was a sudden brightness such that he could see it even behind closed eyelids.

He opened his eyes and saw the glow of starlight.


End file.
